“I haven’t brought it up… if she asks me something, I’ll answer, but I thought this would be a better way to introduce her” to sex, said one mother, referring to her 12-year-old daughter who was attending the workshop.

In India, 47% of girls are married before the age of 18, according to UNICEF, and 28.5% of women report a first birth before age 18, the United Nations Population Fund said in a 2013 report.

Despite this, sex education is not a part of the school curriculum in most parts of India. Last June, the then-health minister Harsh Vardhan came under fire from local media because of a statement on his website saying that “so-called ‘sex education’” in schools should be banned.

According to news reports, Dr. Vardhan later clarified that the statement referred to a 2007 Adolescence Education Program launched by the previous Congress-led government to provide students with better information about sexual and reproductive health.

The controversy the program generated led to its patchy implementation across Indian states, and most schools offer lessons in abstinence — or nothing at all — as the only form of sex education.

Sex education is being outsourced to non-profit or private organizations because the Indian government is “abdicating its responsibility,”

Students are often keen to exercise their rights but recently there has been an interesting twist - some in India are talking about their right to cheat in university exams. 'It is our democratic right!' a thin, addled-looking man named Pratap Singh once said to me as he stood, chai in hand, outside his university in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. 'Cheating is our birthright.' Corruption in the university exam system is common in this part of India. The rich can bribe their way to examination success. There's even a whole subset of the youth population who are brokers between desperate students and avaricious administrators. Then there's another class of student altogether, who are so well known locally - so renowned for their political links - invigilators dare not touch them. I've heard that these local thugs sometimes leave daggers on their desk in the exam hall. It's a sign to invigilators: 'Leave me alone... or else.' So if those with money or political influence can cheat, poorer students ask, why shouldn't they?

Skewed interpretation of data leads to screwed policies. If there is any state in India which badly needs to have a Ministry for men welfare and development, it is Kerala going by feminists logic.

No one denies female foeticide / infanticide are evils which needs to be eradicated. But just because the sex ratio isn’t perfectly 1:1 doesn’t mean the society is regressive and women need more/special privileges to increase the number to make the society perfectly Fisherian. Fact is nothing can change what nature wishes. 1000:900 / 1000:1100 is perfectly okay sex ratio to have and it will automatically balance itself if not for infanticide. In India 1000:900 will work best until older men marry younger women as they will be borrowing females from future. If the ratio reverses, women will have to marry younger men or marry outside the region. Will a Congress PM / anyone other than Narendra Modi as PM automagically change the sex ratio? Have they done it in the past? Then why is it even a factor?

Nearly 400m people live in cities in India and during the next 40 years that number will more than double. Not only is the proportion of India’s total female population that is economically active is among the lowest in the world, but urban areas do even worse. Data from the 2011 census shows only half as many urban women work as their rural counterparts.

Some discrepancy may arise because many women are involved in home-based work and are part of the informal sector, where their contribution tends to be under-reported. “Better enumeration will help, but measurement is not the only reason participation rates are so low in India, especially in urban areas,” Sher Verick, a senior fellow at the International Labour Organisation, said.
Patriarchy rules

According to Verick, the two main factors keeping women at home are social customs and very low education levels among women.

Breaking such customs is hard. Preet Rustagi, joint director of Institute for Human Development in Delhi, said: “To a certain extent, men control women’s lives. And women have internalised this as the norm. In such situations, the little work they do is the result of compulsion, such as when the household income is not enough, rather than choice.”
Few states – including Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia – do worse than India when it comes to women’s participation in the workforce. Others such as Somalia, Bahrain and Malaysia do much better. Among the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) which are comparable emerging economies, India has the lowest female participation rate, with only 29% of women over the age of 15 working.

An Indian physicist puts a PC with a high speed internet connection in a wall in the slums and watches what happens. Based on the results, he talks about issues of digital divide, computer education and kids, the dynamics of the third world getting online.

many (or even most) people find it difficult to interpret visually-represented data – even when this is displayed in relatively simple bar charts and line graphs. Learning how to decode visually represented information is a skill that needs to be developed like any other. With these fresh insights into the challenges that people face, hopefully the School of Data can work to address basic data literacy skills, and improve people’s ability to both present and interpret visual data.

The Book Bus visited ZIGS this week and donated three boxes of books for our library. We are delighted to work in partnership with this wonderful organisation which is committed to raising literacy levels across Zambia, Malawi,Ecuador and most recently India. The books donated will be a wonderful addition to our new library.

When Aakashes began to arrive at IIT Rajasthan for testing, the problems were immediately evident. A third of the devices didn't start at all. Most of those that did either failed the basic drop test, overheated quickly, or saw their screens freeze until the battery ran out. A peek inside the box revealed circuitry and imported components held together by electrical tape.

Readers comments: This project was doomed to fail from the beginning. India which has no global competence in hardware, delivering a working tablet for Indian masses at $35 is a dream. What must be underlined is that Akaash was designed to derail OLPC.

The 2,000-odd Akshaya e-literacy centres spread across Kerala, launched to provide computer education to at least one member in all families in the state, have become effective centres that help the public to avail a multitude of government as well as private services under one roof.

The services available to citizens range from e-filing of tax returns, computer training programme of international standards, UID registration, and inding skilled labourers for construction or maintenance work.

Akshaya registered 15 lakh families in 45 days in the comprehensive health insurance scheme run by Health Insurance Agency of Kerala (CHIAK). Other firms that took up this task could initially register only 20 lakh families in one year.